Again we take pleasure in spreading the truth eloquently told by Pat Condell in another of his series of important videos.

This is a rallying cry to the women of Europe, to vote their pro-Islam governments out, and so save themselves from the Muslim barbarians who have invaded their countries at those governments’ invitation.

The persecution of Christians by Muslims in the Middle East is not news. It is a continuous state of affairs, as much to be expected as unpleasant news is anywhere. It could even be said to be normal.

Among the few journalists who do not ignore it is Raymond Ibrahim. He reports on it frequently.

He recently wrote, at Canada Free Press, about a wave of attacks on Christians in Egypt:

Yet another murderous wave is taking Egypt’s Coptic Christian minority by storm, leading to yet another exodus from their homes.

Last week in al-Arish, Sinai, Islamic State affiliates killed a 65-year-old Christian man by shooting him in the head; they then abducted and tortured his 45-year-old son, before burning him alive and dumping his charred remains near a schoolyard.

The worshipers of  “Allah the Merciful” gouged out his eyes, according to witnesses.

Perhaps because of its sensationalist nature — burning a human alive — this story was reported by some Western media. Yet the atrocities hardly begin or end there. Below is a list of Christians murdered in al-Arish in recent days and weeks:

• January 30:  A 35-year-old Christian was in his small shop working with his wife and young son when three masked men walked in, opened fire on him, instantly killing the Copt.  The murderers then sat around his table, eating chips and drinking soda, while the body lay in a pool of blood before the terrified wife and child.
• February 13: A 57-year-old Christian laborer was shot and killed as he tried to fight off masked men trying to kidnap his young son from off a crowded street in broad daylight.   After murdering the father, they seized his young son and took him to an unknown location (where, per precedent, he is likely being tortured, possibly already killed, if a hefty ransom was not already paid).
• February 16: A 45-year-old Christian schoolteacher was moonlighting at his shoe shop with his wife, when masked men walked in the crowded shop and shot him dead.
• February 17:  A 40-year-old medical doctor was killed by masked men who, after forcing him to stop his car, opened fire and killed him. He too leaves a widow and two children.

… This recent uptick in Christian persecution is believed to be in response to a video earlier released by the Islamic State in Sinai. In it, masked militants promise more attacks on the “worshipers of the cross”, a reference to the Copts of Egypt, whom they also referred to as their “favorite prey” and the “infidels who are empowering the West against Muslim nations”.

As a result of the recent slayings and threats of more to come, at least 300 Christians living in al-Arish have fled their homes, with nothing but their clothes on their backs and their children in their hands. Most have congregated in a Coptic church compound in neighboring Ismailia by the Suez Canal. …

Now here is a short list of measures NOT being taken to help Christian victims of religious persecution by Muslims:

The Pope is speaking out often, loud, and clear against the states that order, promote, sanction, allow, or tolerate the capture, rape, murder, enslavement and displacement of Christians.

The Archbishop of Canterbury is doing the same, and vigorously pressing the British government to demand that the governments of Islamic states put an end to this practice under threat of stopping financial aid. (Only 1% of Egypt’s aid comes from Britain, but the top recipients of British tax-payers’ money include the Islamic states of Pakistan, Nigeria, Syria, Afghanistan, Bangladesh. Nigeria is the country where Boko Haram – an affiliate of ISIS – has been burning, raping, abducting and mass-slaughtering Christians for years. We have posted often about Boko Haram. In particular, see here.)

The Evangelical Christians of America are pressing the US government to do likewise. (US aid to Egypt = $1.5 billion.)

The United Nations is passing resolutions against it, both in the General Assembly and the Security Council, and taking action to prevent and punish it wherever it is occurring.

*

Here’s a little more about what the Pope is doing in regard to this matter.

Robert Spencer writes at Jihad Watch:

AP reported … that Pope Francis “embraced the grand imam [Ahmed al-Tayeb] of Al-Azhar, the prestigious Sunni Muslim center of learning, reopening an important channel for Catholic-Muslim dialogue after a five-year lull and at a time of increased Islamic extremist attacks on Christians.” …

Muslims have massacred, exiled, forcibly converted or subjugated hundreds of thousands of Christians in Iraq and Syria. Have these “improved ties” [between the Vatican and the grand imam] saved even one Christian from suffering at the hands of Muslims? No, they haven’t. All they do is make the “dialogue” participants feel good about themselves, while the Middle Eastern Christians continue to suffer. In fact, the “dialogue” has actually harmed Middle Eastern Christians, by inducing Western Christian leaders to enforce silence about the persecution, for fear of offending their so-easily-offended Muslim “dialogue” partners.

Has the Pope welcomed any of the persecuted Christians to the Vatican? Or is that honor reserved only for this man, who will allow for “dialogue” only when his Christian “dialogue” partners maintain a respectful silence about Muslim massacres of Christians?

The Pope has not welcomed Christian refugees. He invited a pair of Syrian Christian refugee siblings to move to Rome, but changed his mind, disinvited them, and welcomed three Muslim families instead.

President Trump delivered a great speech to Congress on the last day of February, 2017.

We quote an article by Larry Kudlow at Townhall:

The mark of great presidents is optimism – visionary optimism and transformational optimism. During Tuesday night’s remarkable speech before Congress, Donald Trump was brimming with optimism, from start to end. My guess is that his marvelous speech will imbue and inspire new optimism and confidence throughout the entire country.

Stock markets surged over 300 points the day after the speech, and I’ll bet the president’s approval ratings jump over 20 points. …

He was incredibly effective. In fact, he was riveting. You couldn’t take your eyes off him. … You didn’t want to miss a word.

President’s Trump’s speech was infused with civility, which is something we all hoped for as an alternative to the coarseness of American politics (and the rest of the culture, for that matter).

He made fact-based arguments on the economy, health care, education, immigration, national security, and public safety. And he did so respectfully. He attempted to persuade, and it was wonderful to watch. …

This was a unity speech, not a partisan one. The president asked for common ground and common good. …

All the Trump campaign themes were there. He intends to keep his promises. I thought he was especially convincing on merit-based immigration. And he set out the principles of health-care reform, education choice, and law and order everywhere – especially in the big inner cities where poverty has ruled alongside violence in a downward spiral that seems impossible to fix.

In recent days, the president has spoken to various business groups about 3 percent-plus growth, which would generate far more revenues and far fewer deficits than conventional, pessimistic economists argue. During the speech before Congress, the president stuck to his guns on both economic growth and tax reform.

On foreign affairs, he pledged to stay with NATO, but he reminded everyone that his job is to protect the interests of the United States first and foremost.

Kudlow is not in entire agreement with everything the president said.

On trade, his message was more ambiguous. Outright protectionism was muted, but the threat hangs in the air. The divisive border-adjustment tax looks to be part of a White House-GOP congressional deal, which is unfortunate. But let’s wait on that to see the full story.

There’s also the threat of a new GOP entitlement in the form of refundable tax credits. But let’s wait on that as well, until the budget details are released. …

The president concluded. “We want peace, wherever peace can be found,” he said. “The 250th year for America will see a world that is more peaceful, more just, and more free.” …

That is soaring rhetoric. It is vision. It is optimism. It is inspiring. It sounds thrilling. “That is leadership. And that is greatness,” Larry Kudlow writes. “Speeches like this can change history. Do not underestimate this president. Like tens of millions, I’m sure – I’m proud of him.”

We are glad the president said it.

But we doubt it is true.

President Trump can make America great again. Can, and – we think and hope – will.

He can inspire the peoples of Europe to throw off the yoke of the European Union – the Fourth Reich, we now call it – and rebel against the Islamization of their countries.

He can put an end to the long war in Afghanistan.

He might destroy ISIS.

He might cause Russia and China to think many times before making any more expansionist moves.

But the world?

More peaceful with the jihad still raging throughout the West?

More just while sharia law continues to spread?

More free while ever more women put on the veil and submit to the status of slaves?

We like to be optimistic, and we are – for America. We are delighted that the bleak Obama years are over and we feel it is morning in America.

But can even the great President Trump stop the incoming tide of war, injustice, and subjugation in the wider world?

Well, let’s wait to see.

“Political correctness” is a doctrine of the religion of Leftism.

In Europe, anyone who does not conform to it is a blaspheming heretic and must be hunted down, brought to trial, and condemned. It is no defense that the accused spoke the truth. The law protects “political correctness” from the truth.

In this video, Pat Condell fires the truth at the politically correct Dutch cowards who served the hostile interests of Islam by bringing Geert Wilders, heroic leader of the Party of Freedom, to trial late last year, on absurd charges of “insulting a group” – namely, Moroccan Muslims – and “inciting discrimination”. They found him “guilty”.

(See our post about the trial, Speaking Freely for Freedom, December 10, 2016, here.)

Why was the corrupt and undemocratic European Union (EU) brought into existence?

The Germans wanted to dissolve their guilt  – for starting two world wars and perpetrating the Holocaust – in the sea of a European superstate. Which they knew they could dominate through their economic strength.

The French wanted to be part of an entity that was more populous, more prosperous, and more powerful than the United States of America, even though it meant sharing power.

The ambitious politicians of Western Europe wanted a bigger stage to strut on. As well as a perpetual ride on a gravy train.

Eastern European nations had a more respectable motive for joining the EU after the collapse of the Soviet Union, under whose heel they had suffered for some 40 years: they saw the EU as a shelter from renewed Russian imperial ambition. Some of them – notably Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia – are now defying dictatorship from Brussels, the EU capital, by refusing to admit unlimited numbers of Muslim “refugees”.

The annual budget of the EU is about 145 billion euros ($153 billion US dollars). By its own accounting, 4.7% of the budget is lost in fraud and corruption. That is some 6.97 billion Euros.*  

It employs 33,000 people.

There are 28 member states and 24 official languages. Every document has to be put out in all 24 languages.

The EU leaders see their supra-national, “post-nationalist” union as a model for world government.

The Council of the European Union governs by decree. The European Parliament consists of elected members but they do not have the power to legislate. They can approve or reject a legislative proposal, or propose amendments. In other words they give advice, but the Council is not legally obliged to take it. It is treated as mere opinion. For appearance sake, and as a result of case-law decisions by the EU Court of Justice, the Council must receive that opinion before it can act on its own decision. This is pure gesturism. The ritual salutes democracy without adopting it.

In sum, the EU is a political and economic monstrosity. It cannot and will not endure.

Elections this year in the Netherlands may well bring Geert Wilders and his Party for Freedom into power. If so, there could be a referendum on whether the country should leave the EU (though legislation would be necessary to make this possible), and a majority vote in favor.

Nationalist movements in France and Italy may also bring those countries to leave the EU.

All of which threatens the continued existence of the rotten, superfluous, and positively harmful European Union.

From Gatestone, by Timon Dias:

At its core, what is the EU? And why, despite its vast resources, does it seem perpetually unable to make sense of the world and meet its objectives? …

First, there’s the EU’s primary internal contradiction: EU federalism is an ideology that propagates post-ideologism; a culturally amorphous post-ideological world. … It is acting as if the world has already arrived at this so badly coveted post-cultural/ideological end station.

This is why the EU’s foreign minister is convinced political Islam should be part of the solution for Europe’s bicultural malaise. It is why for almost a decade now, the EU is maintaining it is reasonable to expect a German fiscal discipline from Greece ― a country in which tax evasion has been a central pillar of its culture ever since it was conquered by the Ottoman Empire some 600 years ago. It is why the EU fails to grasp the fact it’s deepening the migration crisis by acting as a ferry service for human traffickers. It is why the EU refuses to acknowledge an inherently expansionist religion like Islam views Europe’s open borders as an invitation to conquest. And it is why it was caught off guard by the mass rapes in Cologne etc. …

In short, the EU is treating the world as if it’s already an earthly EUtopia in which everything can be solved through dialogue and the right subsidies. And that’s why it will keep on chasing facts until its imminent demise.

But there’s something even more fundamental obstructing the EU’s ability to solve crises.

The EU is artificial and unnecessary. 

What is the EU? The EU is a government looking for people to govern. It didn’t evolve organically from a community’s desire to be governed.

It was an elitist ideological hobby project ― one that European Commission first Vice-President Frans Timmermans a few weeks ago referred to as:

Arguably the most successful peace project in human history.

This, however, is a deception. A deception so pervasive, it has become the most pivotal element of the Eurocrats’ belief system. But the EU is no peace project. It neither caused nor consolidated peace.

True peace is being able to hurt one another, but simply not wanting to. In 1945, after centuries of conflict, European nation states finally reached this status. Subsequently, the European Economic Community (EEC) consolidated this peace in 1958 by entangling the French and German economies.

The EU came afterwards, without there ever being an actual need for it ― the continent was peaceful and that peace was consolidated. …

So, if the EU neither caused nor consolidated peace, what is the EU’s fundamental raison d’être? The simple answer is: it has none.

There is nothing fundamentally positive about Europe, that could not exist without the EU.

This is no trivial matter.

Because the EU is a highly artificial and non-organic governing body, one without a fundamental raison d’être, the EU’s priority objective, at all times, is self-preservation. Even when this means not solving problems at all.

The euro and migration crises serve as prime examples. The EU is not only not solving the euro crisis, it’s prolonging it by insisting fiscally dysfunctional member states remain member states, simply because their ejection from the EU would endanger and obscure the EU itself.

The same is true for the migration crisis. It’s not hard to solve. To simply stop being a ferry service for human traffickers and implement the very straight forward Australian model, is hardly rocket science. It’s no coincidence Australia’s migration architect claims Europe doesn’t even seem to be trying to solve this crisis.

In 2016, 490,547 migrants reached Europe. The total number of asylum applicants is almost 2.5 times higher at 1.205 million, which is a modest drop from 2015’s 1.323 million. During the first months of 2017, almost 13,000 arrived by sea.

So what is the EU’s priority during the migrant crisis?

Instead, the EU’s highest priority seems to be preventing nation states from bypassing the EU, by taking their own measures against the crisis.

For if that were to happen, the EU would lose its “greatest achievement”: the federal control of European national borders, without which, the EU is nothing.

The EU must go.

The nation-state with strongly defended borders must be resurrected as an ideal.

The British showed the way with Brexit – its majority vote last year to leave the EU.

President Trump lights the way for the European nations with his slogan, “Make America Great Again!”

*We quote an article on EU corruption by Richard Milton.

Have the EU’s accounts for the past 19 years been signed off by the auditors or not? The EU says they have been signed off, while critics in parliament and the media say they have not. So who is telling the truth about the accounts? What are the real facts?

First, a little background to the controversy. Since 1977, the EU’s budget has been audited annually by a body called the European Court of Auditors, based in Luxembourg. The Court is nominally independent, although it is funded by the EU.

In the 1980s, the EU’s budget became the subject of allegations of fraud, so in 1988 the EU formed UCLAF – the Unit for the Co-ordination of Fraud Protection.

A decade later, In 1997, the Court of Auditors investigated UCLAF and discovered that it was dealing with 40 cases of potential corruption, conflict of interests, favoritism or just bad management. Many of the cases had been brought to UCLAF by members of staff of the Commission reporting their suspicions about other officials.

In a report described as “devastating”, the Court revealed that no-one had been prosecuted for fraud and no-one was likely to be prosecuted, because UCLAF had no powers of investigation or arrest and there was no European prosecutor to take on such cases. It recommended that UCLAF be replaced by, in effect, an economic FBI with the staff and the powers to police the EU’s huge budget – a fully fledged operational fraud squad.

Later the same year, 1998, Paul van Buitenen, an assistant internal auditor in the European Commission’s Financial Control Directorate, turned whistleblower and wrote directly to the European Parliament expressing his  “discontent with the way the Commission services are dealing with irregularities and possible fraud”.

His whistleblowing led ultimately led to the resignation of the Commission presided over by Jacques Santer. His reward was to be suspended with his salary halved. He fought back and his exposures triggered the collapse of Santer’s Commission.

In the wake of the “Santergate” scandal UCLAF was replaced by a new organization, OLAF [Office européen de lutte anti-fraude]. This was said to be an improvement since OLAF had more staff, more money and clearer guidelines and was described as representing a move towards a more serious investigative prosecuting body. But it remained the case that only national member states could take legal action against suspected fraudsters – the same central weakness that had defeated UCLAF.

OLAF is notified of some 12,000 cases of possible fraud every year, and says that it adopts a “zero tolerance” policy towards corruption and fraud in EU institutions. In reality, OLAF must be somewhat more tolerant than “zero” as it investigates only some 200 cases per year – that is to say 98% of reported cases go uninvestigated.

This is the most likely explanation of the fact that, since 1999, OLAF has sent only 335 people to jail and recovered only 1.1 Billion Euros of EU money – less than one-thousandth of the amount unaccounted for.

One other obstacle to OLAF nailing anyone inside the EU is that EU law gives EU officials immunity from prosecution both while they work in the EU and then for the rest of their lives for any acts committed in the course of their duties. Even if OLAF managed to put together a case against an EU employee, he or she could not be prosecuted anyway.

This long history of corruption and fraud brings us to the case of Marta Andreason, who in 2002 was appointed the EU’s first Chief Accountant, the director responsible for budget execution and the EU’s accounting officer.

From the start, Andreasen was critical of the EU’s accounting system for being open to fraud, criticisms she raised with  her superior but to no effect. She voiced her doubts to Commissioner Michaele Schreyer and the Commission President Romano Prodi, and when she got no reply approached members of the EU Parliament’s Budget Control Committee.

Because of her doubts, she refused to sign off the 2001 European Commission accounts and went public with her concerns. She suffered a similar fate to Paul van Buitenen before her, and was sacked for speaking out (“failure to show sufficient loyalty and respect”.) In reality she was fired for refusing to sign the account and embarrassing the Commission by letting the cat out of the bag about the extent of fraud.

A series of other EU officials tried to blow the whistle on the fraud and corruption of their colleagues and all received similar treatment, Dorte Schmidt-Brown, Robert Dougal Watt and Robert McCoy. …

At this point, in 2002, EU officials realized that they could no longer conceal or ignore the extent of fraud and corruption in the EU budget and that they must act to try to restore public confidence in the EU’s financial affairs. So they did what most large bureaucratic organizations do in these circumstances. When you cannot change the facts, you change the way the facts are presented. So the EU turned to public relations to solve their problem.

From 2002 until the present, the Court of Auditors continued to audit the budget annually, but they no longer signed off the accounts as a whole. Instead, they have split the budget into two sections – the part to which they are willing to give a clean bill of health, and the part to which they are not willing to give a clean bill. The Auditors refer to this second part as its “opinion on the underlying payments which have been negative or adverse”.

To justify this change in established auditing procedure it came up with a number of arguments. The budget is too big and too complicated for us to expect them to account for every penny. Every large organization has amounts missing and unaccounted for. We can’t expect the EU Auditors to know every little thing that goes on inside member countries. The bit that’s not signed off is “only” a few per cent of the budget so it’s not worth making a fuss about. And, in any case, said the Auditors, although we do not know where the money went or who took it, we can say that it definitely wasn’t fraud or theft.

“Errors”, said the auditors,  “do not mean that EU money is lost, wasted or affected by fraud.” When asked to give an example of some money that had gone missing that wasn’t fraud, the EU said, “A farmer was granted a special premium for 150 sheep. The Court found that the beneficiary did not have any sheep. The corresponding payment was therefore irregular.” The missing money is accounted for by changing the word “fraud” to the word “irregular”. …

Remember, the question we are trying to answer here is … “Have the EU accounts been signed off for the past 19 years?” And the only honest answer to this second question is clearly, “No, they have not been signed off.”

What the EU has done is not to make extra efforts to get to the bottom of its accounts and sign them off, but to change the normal rules of accounts auditing so that they no longer apply to the EU, and to change the meaning of ordinary English words to try to persuade us that this procedure is acceptable. …

The amount not signed off by the Court of Auditors was “only” 4.7% of the budget.  The problem is that 4.7% of the budget is 6.97 billion Euros …

The Express reports:

Just hours after the country’s Prime Minister, Stefan Löfven, slammed Donald Trump for claiming Sweden was in crisis as a result of its liberal refugee policy, Stockholm police were forced to fire a shot into the crowd in the hard-hit suburb of Rinkeby, after a [Muslim] mob of around 30 began attacking officers with rocks. …

In addition to the police being attacked, emergency services had their hands full as 10 cars were set alight in Rinkeby. …

Sweden’s existential crisis comes as officials have placed more than 50 areas on a high risk list where they admit they do not have control.

One police officer took to Facebook to share his frustration.  In a seething post, Peter Springare, who works as an investigator for the police in Örebro, a small city in southern Sweden wrote: “I’m so f***** tired. What I’m writing here isn’t politically correct. But I don’t care. Our pensioners are on their knees, the schools are a mess, healthcare is an inferno, the police are completely destroyed. Everyone knows why, but no one dares or wants to say why.”

Everyone knows it was a Muslim mob. Nobody in Europe dare say it was.

President Trump is vindicated by reality over and over again.

This is the documentary, by Ami Horowitz, that President Trump was alluding to:

West Europeans whose countries are being Islamized by mass Muslim immigration incited by their globalist governments, are offered asylum in an East European country that is refusing to admit Muslim immigrants.

From Breitbart, by Jack Montgomery:

Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán says his country will open its arms to west Europeans fleeing mass immigration and “the lords of globalist politics”. 

“We shall let in true refugees”, Mr Orbán told a cheering audience: “Germans, Dutch, French and Italians, terrified politicians and journalists who here in Hungary want to find the Europe they have lost in their homelands.

”We populist leader has served as the de facto leader of the central and eastern European countries which have resisted the open borders policies of the European Union (EU) and leading member-states in the west of the continent.

Globalist politicians, Mr Orbán contended, are seeking to “sweep away a democracy of debate and replace it with a democracy of [political] correctness”, where “true power, decisions and influence [are] not held by elected governments, but [by] unelected global networks, media gurus and international organizations”.

He cited Britain’s vote to leave the European Union and Donald Trump’s election in the United States as episodes in a wider popular revolt against the “arrogance and condescension” of global elites by ordinary people whose “mouths had been gagged” for too long.

He claimed that history’s departure from “the course marked out for it” in 2016 “mocked the prophets of liberal politics”, who have responded as though “the people are a danger to democracy”. …

The Hungarian government sees the victory of Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election as the historic swerve away from “the course marked out for it” by “the world’s most bizarre coalition of people smugglers, human rights activists and elite European politicians”. 

Also from Breitbart, by Oliver JJ Lane:

Hungary’s foreign minister has praised President-Elect Donald J. Trump and called for … a brake on mass migration saying that illegal migration is a “danger” to Europe. …

Péter Szijjártó, the Hungarian foreign minister and close ally to … Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, said his country was steadfast on immigration policy. …

The direction of foreign policy and migration policy of Donald Trump for Europe is much more favorable than those of the Democrats. In my opinion, the Trump administration will be better for the whole world.

And that is our opinion too.

Swedish women in power visit Iran and wear hijabs.

Hypocrisy beyond imagining? Or cognitive dissonance to the point of lunacy?

Sweden has a “feminist government”, it says.

In the present cabinet there are 12 men and 12 women. But considering what it has wrought – the destruction of Sweden – we’d say that the government consists entirely of girls.

From Clarion Project:

In a trade visit to Iran, 11 members of the self-declared “feminist government” of Sweden greeted Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and other officials dressed in hijabs …

In declaring itself a feminist government, Swedish ministers said, “This means that gender equality is central to the Government’s priorities – in decision-making and resource allocation. A feminist government ensures that a gender equality perspective is brought into policy-making on a broad front, both nationally and internationally…This is a human right and a matter of democracy and justice.”

Masih Alinejad, an Iranian human rights activist who created the Facebook page “My Stealthy Freedom”, where Iranian women post pictures of themselves rebelling against Iran’s modesty laws, asked European female politicians as well as those around the world to reject the mullah’s dictates and realize that this is not a “cultural issue” but “the most visible symbol of oppression”. …

From Breitbart, by Liam Deacon:

Sweden’s “feminist” government has defended its delegation wearing Islamic headscarves in Iran, after receiving widespread accusations of hypocrisy.

Deputy Prime Minister Isabella Lövin recently attacked U.S. President Donald J. Trump for having [only? mainly? some?] men in his top team. However, when her colleagues visited Iran they refused to take a stand against legally enforced female subjugation.

There were 11 women on the trip led by Prime Minister Stefan Lofven this weekend …  and they were all photographed in headscarves “almost all of the time”, apart from at events in the Swedish Embassy. …

Ann Linde, the Minister for European Union Affairs and Trade from the Social Democrat party, defended the move, arguing they could not violate Iranian law.

What would the Iranians have done about it if they had?

And this is from UN Watch:

Trade Minister Linde, who signed multiple agreements with Iranian ministers while wearing a veil, “sees no conflict” between her government’s human rights policy and signing trade deals with an oppressive dictatorship that tortures prisoners, persecutes gays, and is a leading executioner of minors.

“If Sweden really cares about human rights, they should not be empowering a regime that brutalizes its own citizens while carrying out genocide in Syria; and if they care about women’s rights, then the female ministers never should have gone to misogynistic Iran in the first place,” said UN Watch executive director Hillel Neuer.

The government has now come under sharp criticism from centrist and left-wing Swedish lawmakers, who said the ministers should not have deferred to “gender apartheid”.

“They go to my country,” said [Masih] Alinejad recently in the European Parliament, “and they ignore millions of those women who send their photos to me and put themselves in danger to be heard. And [the European politicians] keep their smile, and wearing hijab, and saying this is a ‘cultural issue’—which is wrong.”

Trade minister Ann Linde, one of three Swedish ministers who oversees the country’s “feminist foreign policy,” decided voluntarily to go covered in a long black coat, akin to the Chador, in addition to covering her hair with the compulsory Hijab. She is seen below meeting President Rouhani, and then signing one of multiple agreements with representatives of the theocratic regime.

Sweden itself will soon be an Islamic country. Then the whole population can wear hijabs, chadors, and smirks of infinite self-satisfaction for being more politically correct than any other country on earth – against stiff competition from other West European states.

Are slavery and rape moral because “the Prophet Muhammad” said they are, or is “the Prophet Muhammad” immoral for saying so?

We think Muhammad’s teaching is immoral. We think it is profoundly evil. All of it. We think Muhammad (whether an historical or fictitious figure) is evil.

But Professor Jonathan Brown –  Alwaleed bin Talal Chair of Islamic Civilization in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, and Director of the Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim Christian Understanding – thinks that since Muhammad was all for slavery and rape, they are ipso facto good.

This report comes from the Clarion Project, by Meira Svirsky:

A Georgetown professor of Islamic studies sent shockwaves through the academic and secular world for a lecture he gave essentially condoning Islamic slavery and nonconsensual sex (that’s academic for “rape”). …

In a lecture at the International Institute of Islamic Thought [founded by the Muslim Brotherhood] and in subsequent questions and answers following his talk, Georgetown Islamic Studies professor Jonathan Brown, a convert to Islam, declares:

It’s not immoral for one human to own another human.  

He waxes poetic about the great life a slave has under sharia law (versus slavery under white men in the South) without actually defining that life. …

Brown says slavery itself is not problematic, since –

The Prophet of God [Mohammed] had slaves … There’s no denying that. Are you more morally mature than the Prophet of God? No you’re not.

Rather –

The moral evil is extreme forms of deprivation of rights and extreme forms of control and extreme forms of exploitation. I don’t think it’s morally evil to own somebody because we own lots of people all around us, and we’re owned by people.

Brown mentions examples such as an employer and an employee, taking out a mortgage and even his own marriage, since his wife held certain rights over him. Somehow, the fact that one engages in these activities from his or her own free will and has the ability to terminate such relationships went over the professor’s head, or he chose to ignore them.

Brown tells his audience Islamic slavery was fundamentally better than slavery that was practiced in the U.S., since it was not racially motivated. How that makes it better is beyond my moral compass, but one can simply look at the well documented history of the Arab slave trade of Africans to dispute this.

Although many whites were enslaved by Arab Muslims as well, an estimated 10-20 million black Africans were enslaved between 650 and 1900 by Arab slave traders. Many of these slaves were forcibly castrated to serve as eunuchs that guarded the vast harems of female slaves belonging to the rulers. Black Muslim slaves still exist today, for example, in Mauritania and Sudan.

Black people suffer discrimination in Saudi Arabia, where slavery was only abolished in 1962.

The racial slur abeed, meaning slaves in Arabic, is still widely used to describe black people.

The professor then trots out academic moral relativism in two twisted points of erudition, saying:

There is no such thing as slavery, as a category, as a conceptual category that exists throughout space and time trans-historically.

Slavery cannot just be treated as a moral evil in and of itself because slavery doesn’t mean anything.

It takes a professor to say things that absurd!

As for the permissibility of sex with a slave, Brown says, “Consent isn’t necessary for lawful sex” and goes on to dig at the overrated concept of autonomy over one’s own body, saying our society is “obsessed with the idea of autonomy and consent”. 

When asked if having nonconsensual sex with an enslaved woman – or any woman — is wrong, Brown asks if there is really any difference between a girl sold in a slave market in Istanbul and a poor baker’s daughter who marries a poor baker’s son out of lack of other options:

[The girl’s owner in Istanbul] by the way, might treat her badly, might treat her incredibly well … that baker’s son might treat her well. He might treat her horribly. The difference between these two people is not that big. We see it as enormous because we’re obsessed with the idea of autonomy and consent, would be my first response. It’s not a solution to the problem.I think it does help frame it.

“Frame it” or not, there is a world of difference between the two situations and a simple answer that consent is not a relativistic concept when we are talking about a raping of women would have sufficed.

The fact that a college professor can get away with such apologetic views on such serious moral issues surrounding Islamic thought – issues that entire populations who have been taken over by Islamic State are facing with horrific consequences – is truly staggering.

Daniel Greenfield comments at Front Page:

The International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT), where [Professor Jonathan Brown] shared his alarming beliefs with students in attendance in his lecture, Islam and the Problem of Slavery … is an Islamist Brotherhood project. It’s utterly unsurprising that Brown expected a compliant and friendly audience there. Or that this would be the kind of material presented there.

IIIT is a prominent endorser of the book Reliance of the Traveller: A Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law, an authoritative compendium of sharia written by an eminent 14th-century Islamic jurist. By IIIT’s reckoning, the English translation by Umdat al-Salik is “a valuable and important work” that is highly successful in “its aim to imbue the consciousness of the non-Arabic-speaking Muslim with a sound understanding of Sacred Law”.

According to Andrew McCarthy, Reliance denies freedom of conscience, explaining that “apostasy from Islam is a death-penalty offense”; contends that “a Muslim apostatizes not only by clearly renouncing Islam but by doing so implicitly” — such as by deviating from the consensus of Muslims, or making statements that could be “taken as insolence toward Allah or the prophet Mohammed”; approves a legal caste system in which “the rights and privileges of Muslims and men are superior to those of non-Muslims and women”; penalizes “extramarital fornication by stoning or scourging”; endorses the death penalty for homosexuals and for people who make interest-bearing loans; venerates jihad; and exhorts Muslims “to strive to establish an Islamic government, ruled by a caliph”. 

So that is what we’re dealing with here. And the various promoters of it are complicit in it. Georgetown has been ground zero for Islamist apologetics. …

Brown argues that “slaves were well off under Islam. Better off than some people in America today”. 

Oh, sure. Who could doubt it?

And of  course correct judgment depends on what the meaning of “slavery” is; what the meaning of “rape” is.

Brown is using the standard intellectual tools of the left to legitimize the unacceptable. He deconstructs what slavery is. …  

And this obsession with thinking of slavery as property it’s … I think that’s actually a really … odd … and … and … and unhelpful way to think about slavery, and it kind of gets you locked in this … way of thinking where, if you talk about ownership and people … that you’ve already transgressed some moral boundary that you can’t come back from. But I don’t think that’s true at all. Uh, … I’m trying to think about what slavery actually means, and to show that it doesn’t really … the term doesn’t really mean anything. Uh, that it … it that there’s … so many different phenomena that we would lump under this … the idea of someone who is a by-definition non-consensual sexual actor in the sense that they have been entered into a sexual relationship … in a position of servitude. That’s … sort of … ab initio wrong. The way I would respond to that is to say that … as … I mean this is just a fact. This isn’t a judgment, this is a fact, okay? For most of human history, human beings have not thought of consent as the essential feature of moral … of morally correct sexual activity. And second … we fetishize the idea of autonomy, to the extent that we forget … again, who’s really free? Are we really autonomous people? And what does autonomy mean?

We’re just so obsessed with autonomy that we think of rape as being wrong. But what does autonomy mean? Does anyone have free will? Let’s define free will before we condemn slavery and rape.

This is the sort of sophomoric garbage that Brown is peddling as justification for rape and slavery. It’s another symptom of how our society can now justify anything as long as it’s politically correct.

Slavery and rape are considered the worst modern evils. But play a little word game and suddenly Islamic rape and slavery are okay. Because they’re not really rape and slavery. Because who are we to say that autonomy even exists.

What brings an educated American to defend slavery and rape? What makes him take on a job in which he has perpetually to say what the Muslim Brotherhood will have him say? What was it about Islam that made him want to join it and “submit to Allah”?

How many others on the Left, having decided Islam is good, will go that far?

The Democrats are seriously considering electing a Muslim, Keith Ellison, to the chair of their National Committee.

As judges, they are fighting hard to let multitudes of Muslims into the US from the middle east.

At the same time they change the names of colleges because the old name was that of a slave-owner or supporter of slavery. (See here too.) And they punish male students for rape when they have not committed it.

Are they too deranged to know that this is insane? Or too evil to care?

One state honors Charles Darwin on the anniversary of his birthday.

The day of Darwin’s entry into the world was the beginning of the end for that fictitious character the Creator God. His dying is a long drawn out process, but from February 12, 1809, he was doomed.